Writings

The work of Parmenides is not extant as a whole. Plato and Aristotle quote a line or two; from later writers, particularly Sextus Empiricus and Simplicius, about 150 lines can be recovered. Parmenides wrote in hexameter verse. All the fragments seem to come from a single work, which may have been called On Nature; it is unlikely to have been very long, and the fragments may amount to as much as a third of the whole. The survival of a long consecutive passage of more than sixty lines (Fr. 8) is of the greatest importance; it is the earliest example of an extended philosophical argument.

The poem begins with a description of the poet's journey to the home of a goddess, who welcomes him kindly and tells him that he is to learn "both the unshakeable heart of well-rounded Truth, and the beliefs of mortals...